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8 - Reinventing human rights in an era of hyper-globalisation: a few wayside remarks

from Part II - Interconnections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

By
Upendra Baxi
Edited by
Conor Gearty  and
Costas Douzinas
Conor Gearty
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Costas Douzinas
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

Too much has been said about human rights; my apologies for adding more verbiage! In at least a partial defence, I must say that the engaging recent talk and action about ‘reinventing’ human rights may not be entirely diversionary. New human rights frameworks, instruments, norms and standards are constantly invented. Some old human rights frameworks are also being ‘dis-invented’ in the contemporary conjuncture of neoliberalism and wars of and on terror and in our era of hyperglobalisation. Even as the ascendant forms of primitive accumulation of global capital discredit the hard-won insistence on decency and dignity at workplaces, deny minimum wages and repress associational rights of workers, movements of resistance and counter-power reinvent global solidarity rights. The trinity of invention, disinvention and reinvention calls for some labours of understanding; here, all I aspire towards is an elementary grasp of these three notions.

I think that it is high time that we begin to acknowledge that human rights constitute acts of ethical as well as juridico-political manufacture. The idea of human rights is a remarkable recent ethical invention. It is ethical because human rights enunciate the values of human dignity and freedom; it is juridico-political as a socio-technical invention. Human rights are moral (the responsibility that each human owes to the other) and juridical (the responsibility that political authority owes to citizens as well as all subjects within its jurisdiction). Human rights constitute an invention because they generate new signifying systems of values, principles, institutions, movements, practices and languages.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law , pp. 150 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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